07 
1 



THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



THE ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

1914 



Hamlet and Orestes 

A Study in Traditional Types 



By 

Gilbert Murray, LL.D., D.Litt. 

Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford 
Fellow of the Academy 



New York 

Oxford University Press American Branch 

35 West 32nd Street 

London : Humphrey Milford 



THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



THE ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

1914 



Hamlet and Orestes 

A Study in Traditional Types 



By 
Gilbert Murray, LL.D., D.Litt. 

Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford 
Fellow of the Academy 



New York 

Oxford University Press American Branch 

35 West 32nd Street 

London : Humphrey Milford 






Copyright in the United States of America 

by the Oxford University Press 

American Branch 

1914 



CU387143 



OCT 22 1914 



ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

HAMLET AND ORESTES 

A STUDY IN TRADITIONAL TYPES 
By Gilbert Murray, LL.D., D.Litt. 

FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 



Ladies and Gentlemen, 

I am no Shakespearian scholar ; and if I have ventured, at the 
invitation of the Academy, to accept the perilous honour of deliv- 
ering its Annual Shakespeare Lecture in succession to lecturers, 
and in the presence of listeners, whose authority on this subject is 
far greater than mine, it is for a definite reason. In studying the 
general development of Tragedy, Greek, English, French and 
Mediaeval Latin, I have found myself haunted by a curious prob- 
lem, difficult to state in exact terms and perhaps impossible to 
answer, which I should much like to lay before an audience such 
as this. It concerns the interaction of two elements in Literature, 
and especially in Drama, which is a very primitive and instinctive 
kind of literature : I mean the two elements of tradition and inven- 
tion, or the unconscious and the conscious. The problem has been 
raised in three quite recent discussions: I mention them in 
chronological order. My own note on the Ritual Forms in Greeh 
Tragedy, printed in Miss Harrison's Themis; Mr. F. M. Corn- 
ford's book on the Origin of Attic Comedy; and a course of 
lectures given at Oxford by Miss Spens of Lady Margaret Hall 
on The Scapegoat in Tragedy, which I hope to see published next 
year. I am not proposing to-night to argue in favour of the 
theories propounded in any of these treatises. I am rather con- 
sidering, in one salient instance, a large question which seems to 
underlie them. As for my own tentative answer to the problem, 
I will only mention that it has received in private two criticisms. 
One friend has assured me that every one knew it before ; another 
has observed that most learned men, sooner or later, go a little 



4 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

mad on some subject or other, and that I am just about the right 
age to begin. 

My subject is the study of two great tragic characters, Hamlet 
and Orestes, regarded as Traditional Types. I do not compare 
play with play, but simply character with character, though in the 
course of the comparison I shall of course consider the situations 
in which my heroes are placed, and the other persons with whom 
they are associated. 

Orestes in Greek is very clearly a traditional character. He 
occurs in poem after poem, in tragedy after tragedy, varying 
slightly in each one but always true to type. He is, I think, the 
most central and typical tragic hero on the Greek stage; and he 
occurs in no less than seven of our extant tragedies — ^eight if we 
count the Iphigenia in Aulis, where he is an infant — whereas 
Oedipus, for instance, only comes in three and Agamemnon in 
four. I shall use all these seven plays as material : viz. Aeschylus, 
Choephori and Eumenides; Sophocles, Electra; and Euripides, 
Electra, Orestes, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Andromache. And 
before any of these plays was written Orestes was firmly fixed both 
in religious worship and in epic and lyric tradition. 

As for Hamlet, I note in passing the well-known fragments of 
evidence which indicate the existence of a Hamlet-tragedy before 
the publication of Shakespeare's Second Quarto in 1604. 

These are, counting backwards : a phrase in Dekker's Satiro- 
mastix, 1602, 'My name's Hamlet: Revenge!' 

1598. Gabriel Harvey's remarks about Shakespeare's Hamlet. 
The true date of this entry is disputed. 

1596. Lodge, Wifs Miserie and the World's Madness: 'he 
looks as pale as the ghost which cried so miserally at the theator 
like an oysterwife, Hamlet, revenge.' 

1594. Henslowe's Diary records a play called Hamlet as acted 
at Newington Butts Theatre on June 9. 

The earliest reference seems to be in Nash's Epistle prefixed to 
Greene's Menaphon: it is dated 1589, but was perhaps printed in 
1587. ' Yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes many 
good sentences, as Bloud is a beggar, and so foorth: and if you 
intreate him f aire in a frosty morning, he will affoord you whole 
Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragicall speeches.' 

The play of Hamlet is extant in three main forms : 

The First Quarto, dated 1603 but perhaps printed in 1602. It 
is entitled ' The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmark 
by William Shake-speare, As it hath been at divers times acted 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 5 

by his Highnesse servants in the Cittie of London : as also in the 
two Vniversities of Cambridge and Oxford and else-where '. It is 
much shorter than the Hamlet which we commonly read, having 
only 2,143 lines, many of them incomplete, as against the 3,891 
of the Globe edition. It differs from our version also in the order 
of the scenes and to some extent in plot. For instance, the Queen's 
innocence of her husband's murder is made quite explicit: when 
she hears how it was wrought she exclaims : 

But, as I have a soul, I swear by Heaven 
I never knew of this most horride murder ; 

and thereafter she acts confidentially with Hamlet and Horatio. 
Also some of the names are different : for Polonius we have Coram- 
bis, and for Reynaldo Montano. 

The Second Quarto, dated 1604, describes itself as * enlarged to 
almoste as much againe as it was, according to the true and 
perfecte coppie '. 

Thirdly, there is the Folio of 1623. This omits a good deal 
that was in the Second Quaito, and contains some passages which 
are not in that edition but have their parallels in the First 
Quarto. 

Thus Hamlet, like most of the great Elizabethan plays, presents 
itself to us as a whole that has been gradually built up, not as a 
single definitive creation made by one man in one effort. There was 
an old play called Hamlet extant about 1587, perhaps by Kyd or 
another. It was worked over and improved by Shakespeare; im- 
proved doubtless again and again in the course of its different 
productions. We can trace additions ; we can even trace changes 
of mind or repentances, as when the Folio of 1623 goes back to 
a discarded passage in the First Quarto. It is a live and growing 
play; apt no doubt to be slightly different at each performance, 
and growing steadily more profound, more rich, and more varied 
in its appeal. ' 

And before it was an English play, it was a Scandinavian story : 
a very ancient Northern tale, not invented by any one, but just 
living, and doubtless from time to time growing and decaying, in 
oral tradition. It is recorded at length, of course with some re- 
modelling, both conscious and unconscious, by Saxo Grammaticus 
in his great History of the Danes, Gesta Danorum, Books III and 
IV. Saxo wrote about the year 1185; he calls his hero Amlethus, 
or AmloiJi, prince of Jutland, and has worked in material that 



6 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914. 

seems to come from the classical story of Brutus — ^Brutus the 
Fool, who cast out the Tarquins — and the deeds of Anlaf Curan, 
king of Ireland. But the story of Hamlet existed long before 
Saxo ; for the Prose Edda happens to quote a song by the poet 
Snaebjorn, composed about 980, with a reference to ' Amlodi '. 
And it must mean our Amlodi; for our Amlodi in his pretended 
madness was a great riddle-maker, and the song refers to one of 
his best riddles. He speaks in Saxo of the sand as meal ground 
by the sea ; and Snaebje-rn's song calls the sea ' Amlodi's meal- 
bin '. 

Besides Saxo we have a later form of the same legend in the 
Icelandic Ambales Saga. The earliest extant manuscripts of this 
belong to the seventeenth century. 

Thus our sources for Hamlet will be (1) the various versions 
of the play known to us, (2) the story in Saxo Grammaticus and 
the Ambales Saga, and (3) some occasional variants of these 
sagas.^ 

II 

Now to our comparison. 

1. The general situation. In all the versions, both Northern 
and Greek, the hero is the son of a king who has been murdered 
and succeeded on the throne by a younger kinsman — a cousin, 
Aegisthus, in the Greek; a younger brother, Feng or Claudius, 
in the Northern. The dead king's wife has married his murderer. 
The hero, driven by supernatural commands, undertakes and car- 
ries through the duty of vengeance. 

In Shakespeare the hero dies as his vengeance is accomplished; 
but this seems to be an innovation. In Saxo, Ambales, and the 
Greek he duly succeeds to the kingdom. In Saxo there is no men- • 
tion of a ghost; the duty of vengeance is perhaps accepted as 
natural. In Ambales, however, there are angels ; in the English, 
a ghost; in the Greek, dreams and visions of the dead father, and 
an oracle. 

2. In all versions of the story there is some shyness about the 
mother-murder. In Saxo the mother is not slain ; in Shakespeare 
she is slain by accident, not deliberately murdered; in Ambales 
she is warned and leaves the burning Hall just in time. In one 

- of the variants the mother refuses to leave the Hall and is burnt 

* There are, of course, numerous variants and offshoots of the Hamlet story. 
See Corpus Eamleticum by Professor Josef Schick of Munich. Only vol. i, 
Das Gluckshind mit dem Todeshrief (1912), seems to be out. 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 7 

with her husband/ In the Greek versions she is deliberately slain, 
but the horror of the deed unseats the hero's reason. We shall 
consider this mother more at length later on. 

S. In all the versions the hero is in some way under the shadow 
of madness. This is immensely important, indeed essential, in his 
whole dramatic character. It is present in all the versions, but 
is somewhat different in each. 

In Hamlet the madness is assumed, but I trust I am safe in 
saying that there is something in the hero's character which at 
least makes one wonder if it is entirely assumed. I think the 
same may be said of Amloui and Ambales. 

In the Greek the complete madness only comes as a result of 
the mother-murder ; yet here too there is that in the hero's char- 
acter which makes it easy for him to go mad. In the Choephori, 
where we see him before the deed, he is not normal. His language 
is strange and broken amid its amazing eloquence ; he is a haunted 
man. In other plays, after the deed, he is seldom actually raving. 
But, like Hamlet, in his mother's chamber he sees visions which 
others cannot: 

You see them not: 'tis only I that see 

(CJio. 1061, cf. Or. 255-79) ; he indulges freely in soliloquies 
(7. T. 77-94, El. 367-90 ; cf . I. T. 940-78 ; Cho. 268-305 and last 
scene) ; especially, like Hamlet, he is subject to paralysing doubts 
and hesitations, alternating with hot fits. For instance, once in 
the Iphigenia he suddenly wishes to fly and give up his whole 
enterprise and has to be checked by Pylades (7. T. 93-103) : 

O God, where hast thou brought me? what new snare 

Is this ? — I slew my mother, I avenged 

My father at thy bidding. I have ranged 

A homeless world, hunted by shapes of pain. . . . 

. . . We still have time to fly for home, 

Back to the galley quick, ere Avorse things come. 

Pylades 
To fly we dare not, brother: 'tis a thing 
Not of our custom. 

Again, in the Electra he suspects that the God who commands him 
to take vengeance may be an evil spirit in disguise: 

^ Halfdan is killed by his brother Frodi, who also takes his wife. Halfdan's 
sons Helgi and Hroar eventually burn Frodi at a feast. See Professor Elton's 
appendix to his translation of Saxo, edited by York Powell. 



8 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

How if some fiend of Hell 
Hid in God's likeness spake that oracle? 
(El. 979 ; cf . Hamlet, 11. 2 : 

The spirit that I have seen 
May be the devil). 

At the moment before the actual crisis he is seized with horror 
and tries to hold back. In the Choephori this is given in a line or 
two: ' Pylades, what am I do? Let me spare my mother!' — or 
* Shall I spare,' if we put a query at the end of the line (Cho. 
899). In the Electra it is a whole scene, where he actually for 
the moment forgets what it is that he has to do; he only remem- 
bers that it has something to do with his mother. 

The scene is so characteristic that I must quote several lines 
of it. Aegisthus has just been slain: Clytemnestra is seen ap- 
proaching (Electra, 962-87). 

Orestes 
What would we with our mother? . . . Didst thou say 
Kill her? 

Electra 
What? Is it pity? . . . Dost thou fear 
To see thy mother's shape? 

Orestes 

'Twas she that bare 
My body into life. She gave me suck. 
How can I strike her? 

Electra 
Strike her as she struck 
Our father! 

Orestes (to himself, brooding) 
Phoebus, God, was all thy mind 
Turned unto darkness? 

Electra 

If thy God be blind, 
Shalt thou have light? 

Orestes (as before) 

Thou, Thou, didst bid me kill 
My mother: which is sin. 

Electra 

How brings it ill 
To thee, to raise our father from the dust? 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 9 

Orestes 
I was a clean man once. . . . Shall I be thrust 
From men's sight, blotted with her blood? . . , 

Again he vows, too late, after the mother-murder, that his Father's 
Ghost, if it had known all, would never have urged him to such 
a deed: it would rather 

have knelt down 
And hung his wreath of prayers about my beard, 
To leave him unavenged 

(Or. 288-93). In Hamlet this behef is made a fact; the Ghost 
specially charges him not to kill Gertrude: 

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
Against thy Mother aught 

(Hamlet, I. 5; cf. also the tone in HI. 4). 

Is it too much to say that, in all these strangely characteristic 
speeches of Orestes, every line .might have been spoken by Hamlet, 
and hardly a line by any other tragic character except those 
directly influenced by Orestes or Hamlet? 

Now what do we find in the sagas? Both in Saxo and in 
Ambales the madness is assumed, entirely or mainly, but in its 
quality also it is utterly diff^erent. Hamlet in both sagas is not 
a highly wrought and sensitive man with his mind shaken by a 
terrible experience, he is simply a Fool, a gross Jester, covered 
with dirt and ashes, grinning and mowing and eating like a hog, 
spared by the murderer simply because he is too witless to be 
dangerous. The name ' Amloui ' itself means a fool. This side 
is emphasized most in Ambales, but it is clear enough in Saxo 
also and explains why he has combined his hero with the Fool 
Brutus. Hamlet is a Fool, though his folly is partly assumed 
and hides superhuman cunning. 

4. The Fool. It is very remarkable that Shakespeare, who 
did such wonders in his idealized and half-mystic treatment of 
the real Fool, should also have made his greatest tragic hero out 
of a Fool transfigured. Let us spend a few moments on noticing 
the remains of the old Fool characteristics that subsist in the 
transfigured hero of the tragedies. For one thing, as has often 
been remarked, Hamlet's actual language is at times exactly 
that of the regular Shakespearian Fool: e.g. with Polonius in 
II. 2; just before the play in III. 2, and after. But apart from 
that, there are other significant elements. 



10 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

(a) The Fool's Disguise. Amlodi and Brutus and Shake- 
speare's Hamlet feign madness ; Orestes does not. Yet the ele- 
ment of disguise is very strong in Orestes. He is always dis- 
guising his feelings : he does so in the ChoepJiori, Sophocles' 
Electra, Euripides' Electra and IpJiigenia in Tauris. In two 
passages further, Andromache 980 and /. T. 956, he narrates 
how, in other circumstances, he had to disguise them: 

I suffered in silence and made pretence not to see. 

I suffered, Oh, I suffered; but as things drove me I endured. 

This is like Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is also very like the saga 
Hamlet, who laughs in pretended idiocy to see his brother hanged. 

Again, it is a marked feature of Orestes to be present in dis- 
guise, especially when he is supposed to be dead, and then at 
some crisis to reveal himself with startling effect. He is apt to 
be greeted by such words as ' Undreamed of phantom ! ' or ' Who 
is this risen from the dead?' (Or. 879, 385, 478 f . ; I.T. 1361, 
cf. 1321; Andr. 884). He is present disguised and unknown in 
the Choephori, Sophocles' Electra, Euripides' Electra and 
Iphigenia in Tauris; he is in nearly every case supposed to be 
dead. In the Choephori and Sophocles' Electra he brings the 
funeral urn that is supposed to contain his own ashes ; in the 
Iphigenia he interrupts his own funeral rites. 

No other character in Greek Tragedy behaves in this extraordi- 
nary way. But Saxo's Amlodi does. When Amlodi goes to 
England he is supposed to be dead, and his funeral feast is in 
progress, when he walks in, ' striking all men utterly aghast ' 
(Saxo, 95). 

In Hamlet there is surely a remnant of this motive, consider- 
ably softened. In Act V. 2, the Gravedigger scene, Hamlet has 
been present in disguise while the gravedigger and the public 
thought he was in England, and the King and his confidants 
must have believed him dead, as they do in Saxo. Then comes 
the Funeral — not his own but Ophelia's ; he stays hidden for a 
time, and then springs out revealing himself : ' This is I, Hamlet 
the Dane ! ' The words seem like an echo of that cry that is so 
common in the Greek tragedies : ' 'Tis I, Orestes, Agamemnon's 
son! ' (Andr. 884; /. T. 1361; cf. Cho. 212 ff.; El. 220; also the 
recognition scenes). And one is reminded, too, of the quotation 
from the pre-Shakespearian Hamlet in Dekker's Satiromastix of 
1602: 'My name's Hamlet! Revenge!' I suspect that these 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 11 

melodramatic appearances were perhaps more prominent in the 
tradition before Shakespeare. 

(b) The Disorder of the Fool. This disguise motive has led 
us away from the Fool, though it is closely connected with him. 
Another curious element of the Fool that lingers on is his dirtiness 
and disorder in dress. Saxo says that Amlodi ' remained always 
in his mother's house, utterly listless and unclean, flinging himself 
on the ground and bespattering his person with foul dirt ' (Saxo,. 
88). Ambales was worse; enough to say that he slept in his 
mother's room and ' ashes and filth reeked off him ' {Ambales, 
pp. 73-5, 77). We remember Ophelia's description of Hamlet's 
coming to her chamber 

his doublet all unbraced; 
No hat upon his head ; his stockings fouled, 
Ungartered and down-gyved to the ankle. 
Pale as his shirt ... 

Similarly Orestes, at the beginning of the play that bears his 
name, is found with his sister, ghastly pale, with foam on his 
mouth, gouts of rheum in his eyes, his long hair matted with dirt 
and ' made wild with long unwashenness '. ' Poor curls, poor filthy 
face', his sister says to him (Or. 219-26). In the Electra, too, 
he is taken for a brigand (El. 219), which suggests some lack of 
neatness in dress ; in the /. T. we hear of his foaming at the mouth 
and rolling on the ground (307 f.). In both plays, it is true, 
Orestes carries with him an air of princely birth, but so, no doubt, 
did Hamlet, whatever state his stockings were in. 

(c) The Fool's Rudeness of Speech. Besides being dirty and 
talking in riddles the Fool was abusive and gross in his language. 
This is the case to some degree in Saxo, though no doubt the 
monk has softened Amlodi's words. It is much emphasized in 
Ambales. That hero's language is habitually outrageous, es- 
pecially to women. This outrageousness of speech has clearly 
descended to Hamlet, in whom it seems to be definitely intended 
as a morbid trait. He is- obsessed by revolting images. He does 

like a whore unpack his heart in words 
And fall a-cursing like a very drab, 

and he rages at himself because of it. 

(d) The Fool on Women. Now the general style of Greek 
tragedy will not admit any gross language. So Orestes has lost 
this trait. But a trace of it perhaps remains. Both Orestes 
and Hamlet are given to expressing violently cynical opinions 



12 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

about women (Or. 246-51, 566-72, 935-42). The Orestes bristles 
with parallels to the ravings of Hamlet's ' Get-thee-to-a-Nun- 
nery ' scene (HI. 1). The hero is haunted by his ' most pernicious 
woman '. All women want to murder their husbands ; it is only a 
question of time. Then they will fly in tears to their children, 
show their breasts and cry for sympathy. We may, perhaps, 
couple with these passages the famous speech {Or. 552 fF. based 
on Apollo's ruling in the Eumenides), where he denies any blood 
relationship with his mother; and the horrible mad line where he 
says he could never weary of killing evil women {Or. 1590). 

Both heroes also tend — if I may use such an expression — to bully 
any woman the}"- are left alone with. Amlodi in Saxo mishandles 
his foster-sister — though the passage is obscure — and utters 
violent reproaches to the Queen. (The scene is taken over by 
Shakespeare.) Ambales is habitually misbehaving in this way. 
Hamlet bullies Ophelia cruelly and * speaks daggers ' to the 
Queen. He never meets any other woman. Orestes is very surly 
to Iphigenia {I. T. 482 ff.); draws his sword on Electra in one 
play, and takes her for a devil in another {El. 220 ff. ; Or. 264) ; 
holds his dagger at the throat of Hermione till she faints {Or. 
1575 ff.); denounces, threatens, and kills Clytemnestra, and tries 
to kill Helen. There are not many tragic heroes with such an 
extreme anti-feminist record. 

The above, I think, are all of them elements that go deep down 
into the character of the hero as a stage figure. I will now add 
some slighter and more external coincidences. 

1. In both traditions the hero has been away from home when 
the main drama begins, Orestes in Phocis, Hamlet in Wittenberg. 
This point, as we shall see later, has some significance. 

2. The hero in both traditions — and in both rather strangely — 
goes on a ship, is captured by enemies who want to kill him, but 
escapes. And as Hamlet has a sort of double escape, first from 
the King's treacherous letter, and next from the pirates, so Orestes 
in the Iphigenia escapes once from the Taurians who catch him 
on the shore, and again from the pursuers in the ship. Ambales 
has similar adventures at sea ; and the original Amlodi seems to 
have had nautical connexions, since the sea was his meal-bin, and 
the ship's rudder his knife.^ 

S. Much more curious, and indeed extraordinary, is the follow- 
ing point, which occurs in Saxo, Ambales, and the Greek, but not 

* See also a pamphlet Grotfa Songr and the Orkney and Shetland Quern by 
A. W. Johnston, 1912. 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 13 

in Shakespeare. We have seen that the hero is always a good 
deal connected with the dead and graves and ghosts and funerals. 
Now in the sagas he on one occasion wins a great battle after a 
preliminary defeat by a somewhat ghastly stratagem. He picks 
up his dead — or his dead and wounded — and ties them upright 
to stakes and rocks, so that when his pursuers renew their attack 
they find themselves affronted by an army of dead men standing 
upright, and fly in dismay. Now in Electra, 680, Orestes prays 
to his Father: 

Girt with thine own dead armies wake. Oh wake, 

or, quite literally, ' Come bringing every dead man as a fellow- 
fighter '. One would almost think here that there was some direct 
influence — of course with a misunderstanding. But the parallel 
may be a mere chance. 

4). I would not lay much stress on the coincidence about the 
serpent. Clytemnestra dreams that she gives birth to a Serpent, 
which bites her breast. Orestes, hearing of it, accepts the omen: 
he will be the serpent. And at the last moment Clytemnestra so 
recognizes him: 

Oh, God; 

This is the serpent that I. bore and suckled. 

We are reminded of the Ghost's words : 

The serpent that did sting thy Father's life 
Now wears his crown. 

However, Shakespeare abounds in serpents, and I have found no 
trace of this serpent motive in the sagas (Clio. 527-50, 928; Or. 
m^\ Hamlet, I. 5). 

5. Nor yet would I make anything of the point that both 
Hamlet and Orestes on one occasion have the enemy in their 
power and put off killing him in order to provide a worse death 
afterwards. This is important in Hamlet, HI. 3 : ' Now might I 
do it pat, now he is praying ', but only occurs as a slight incident 
in Sophocles' Electra, 1491 ff., and may be due merely to the 
Greek rule of having no violent deaths on the stage. Nor is 
there much significance in the fact that in both traditions the 
hero has a scene in which he hears the details of his father's 
death and bursts into uncontrollable grief {Clio. 430 ff. ; El. 290; 
Hamlet, I. 5, * Oh, all you host of heaven', &c.). Such a scene 
is in both cases almost unavoidable. 



14 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

Let us now follow this Father for a little while. He was, per- 
haps naturally, a great warrior. He ' slew Troy's thousands ' ; 
he ' smote the sledded Polacks on the ice '. It is a particular re- 
proach that the son of such a man should be so slow-tempered, 
' peaking like John-a-dreams ', and so chary of shedding blood 
{El. 245, 336 ff., 275 fF., 186 ff.). The old king was also gen- 
erally idealized and made magnificent. He had some manly faults, 
yet ' He was a man, taking him all in all ' . . . He was ' a king 
of kings' (El. 1066 if. ). A special contrast is drawn between 
him and his successor (El. 320 ff., 917, 1080) : 
It was so easy to be true. A King 
Was thine, not feebler, not in any thing 
Below Aegisthus ; one whom Hellas chose 
Above all kings. 
One might continue: ' Look on this picture and on this.' 

We may also notice that the successor, besides the vices which 
are necessary, or at least desirable, in his position, is in both 
cases accused of drunkenness (Hamlet, I. 4; El. 326), which 
seems irrelevant and unusual. 

Lastly, and more important, one of the greatest horrors about 
the Father's death in both traditions is that he died without the 
due religious observances. In the Greek tragedies, this lack of 
religious burial is almost the central horror of the whole story. 
Wherever it is mentioned it comes as something intolerable, 
maddening ; it breaks Orestes down. A good instance is the scene 
in the Choephori, where Orestes and Electra are kneeling at their 
father's grave, awakening the dead and working their own passion 
to the murder point. 

Electra 
Ah, pitiless one, mj^ mother, mine enemy ! With an enemy's 
burial didst thou bury him: thy King without his people, 
without dying rites ; thine husband without a tear ! 

Orestes 
All, all, in dishonour thou tellest it, woe is me ! And for that 
dishonouring she shall pay her punishment : by the will of the 
Gods, by the will of my hands : Oh, let me but slay, and then 
perish ! 
He is now ripe for the hearing of the last horror : 

Leader of the Chorus 
His hody was mangled to lay his ghost! There, learn it 
all . . . 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 15 

and the scene becomes hysterical (Cho. 435 ff . ; cf. Soph., El. 443 
ff.: Bur., El. 289, 323 fF.). 

The atmosphere is quite different in the English. But the lack 
of dying rites remains and retains a strange dreadfulness : 

Cut off even in the blossom of my sin, 
Unhouselled, disappointed, unannealed. 

To turn to the other characters ; in both the dramatic traditions 
the hero has a faithful friend and confidant, who also arrives from 
Phocis-Wittenberg, and advises him about his revenge. This 
friend, when the hero is threatened with death, wishes to die too 
(Or. 1069 ff.; /. T. 675 ff.), but is prevented by the hero and 
told to ' absent him from felicity awhile '. This motive is worked 
out more at length in the Greek than in the English. 

Also the friendship between Orestes and Pylades is more in- 
tense than between Hamlet and Horatio ; naturally, since devoted 
friendship plays always a greater part in antiquity. But Ham- 
let's words are strong: 

Give me the man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, yea, in my heart of hearts ; 
As I do thee. 

I find no Pylades-Horatio in the sagas ; though there is a 
brother to Hamlet, sometimes older and sometimes a twin, and in 
some of the variants, such as the stories of Helgi and Hroar, 
there are pairs of avengers, one of whom is mad or behaves like a 
madman. 

Next comes a curious point. At first sight it seems as if all 
the Electra motive were lacking in the modern play, all the 
Ophelia-Polonius motive in the ancient. Yet I am not sure. 

In all the ancient plays Orestes is closely connected with a 
strange couple, a young woman and a very old man. They are 
his sister Electra and her only true friend, an old and trusted 
servant of the dead King, who saved Orestes' life in childhood. 
This old man habitually addresses Electra as ' my daughter ' — 
not merely as ' Child ', Ttai?, but really ' daughter ', Ovydrtjp 
(El. 493, 563). She in return carefully avoids calling him 
' Father ' ; that is to her a sacred name, and she will never use 
it lightly, at least in Euripides. But in Sophocles she says em- 
phatically : ' Hail, Father. For it is as if in thee I saw my 
Father!' (S. El. 1361). 



16 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

In the Elizabethan play this couple — if we may so beg the 
question — has been transformed. The sister is now the mistress, 
Ophelia ; the old servant of the King — for so we must surely 
describe Polonius or Corambis — remains, but has become Ophelia's 
real father. And their relations to the hero are quite different. 

The change is made more intelligible when we look at the sagas. 
There the young woman is not a sister but a foster-sister; like 
Electra she helps Amloui, like Ophelia she is his mistress. The 
old servant of the King is not her father — so far like the Greek; 
but there the likeness stops. He spies on Amlodi in his mother's 
chamber and is killed for his pains, as in the English. 

We may notice, further, that in all the Electra plays alike a 
peculiar effect is got from Orestes' first sight of his sister, either 
walking in a band of mourners or alone in mourning garb {Cho. 
16; S. El. 80; El 107 ff.). He takes her for a slave, and cries, 
* Can that be the unhappy Electra ? ' A similar but stronger effect 
is reached in Hamlet, V. 1, when Hamlet, seeing an unknown 
funeral procession approach, gradually discovers whose it is 
and cries in horror : ' What, the fair Ophelia ? ' 

Lastly, there is something peculiar, at any rate in the Northern 
Tradition — I will take the Greek later — about the hero's mother. 
Essentially it is this ; she has married the murderer of her first 
husband and is in part implicated in the murder, and yet the 
tradition instinctively keeps her sympathetic. In our Hamlet 
she is startled to hear that her first husband was murdered, yet 
one does not feel clear that she is perfectly honest with herself. 
She did not know Claudius had poisoned him, but probably that 
was because she obstinately refused to put together things which 
she did know and which pointed towards that conclusion. At 
any rate, though she does not betray Hamlet, she sticks to 
Claudius and shares his doom. In the First Quarto she is more 
definitely innocent of the murder; when she learns of it she 
changes sides, protects Hamlet and acts in confidence with 
Horatio. In Saxo her attitude is as ambiguous as in the later 
Hamlet; she is friendly to Hamlet and does not betray him, yet 
does not turn against Feng either. 

A wife who loves her husband and bears him children, and then 
is wedded to his slayer and equally loves him, and does it all in a 
natural and unemotional manner : somewhat unusual. 

And one's surprise is a little increased to find that in Saxo 
Amlodi's wife, Hermutrude, does the same as his mother has done. 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 17 

On Amlodi's death she marries his slayer, Wiglek. Again, there 
is an Irish king, historical to a great degree, who has got deeply 
entangled with the Hamlet story. His name is Anlaf Curan. 
Now his wife, Gormflaith, carried this practice so far that the 
chronicler comments on it. After Anlaf's defeat at Tara she 
marries his conqueror Malachy, and on Malachy's defeat marries 
Malachy's conqueror Brian. We will consider later the Greek 
parallels to this enigmatic lady. For the present we must admit 
that she is very unlike the Clytemnestra of Greek tragedy, whose 
motives are studied in every detail, who boldly hates her husband 
and murders him. There are traces in Homer of a far less 
passionate Clj-iiemnestra. 

in 

Now I hope I have not tried artificially to make a case or to 
press my facts too hard. But I think it will be conceded that 
the points of similarity, some fundamental and some perhaps 
superficial, between these two tragic heroes are rather extraordi- 
nary; and are made the more striking by the fact that Hamlet 
and Orestes are respectively the very greatest or most famous 
heroes of the world's two great ages of tragedy. 

The points of similarity, we must notice, fall into two parts. 
There are first the broad similarities of situation between what 
we may call the original sagas on both sides ; that is, the general 
story of Orestes and of Hamlet respectively. But secondly, there 
is something much more remarkable; when these sagas were 
worked up into tragedies, quite independently and on very dif- 
ferent lines, by the great dramatists of Greece and England, not 
only do most of the old similarities remain, but a number of new 
similarities are developed. That is, Aeschylus, Euripides, and 
Shakespeare are strikingly similar in certain points which do not 
occur at all in Saxo or Ambales or the Greek epic. For instance, 
the hero's madness is the same in Shakespeare and Euripides, but 
is totally different from the madness in Saxo or Ambales. 

What is the connexion? Did Shakespeare study these Greek 
tragedians directly? No, all critics seem to be agreed that he 
did not. And, if any one should suggest that he did, I have 
further objections to urge, which would, I think, make that 
hypothesis unserviceable. Of course it is likely enough that some 
of Shakespeare's university friends, who knew Greek, may have 
told him in conversation of various stories or scenes or effects 
in Greek plays. Miss Spens suggests the name of Marston. She 



18 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

shows that he consciously imitated the Greek — for instance, in 
getting a special effect out of the absence of funeral rites — and 
probably had considerable influence on Shakespeare. Tliis is a 
highly important line of inquiry. But such an explanation would 
not carry us very far with Shakespeare, and would be no help 
with Saxo. 

Can it be indirect imitation through Seneca .'' No. Orestes 
only appears once in the whole of Seneca, and then he is a baby 
unable to speak {Agamemnon, 910-43). And in any case Saxo 
does not seem to have studied Seneca. 

Will Scandinavian mercenaries at the Court of Byzantium help 
us? Or, simpler perhaps, will the Roman conquest of Britain? 
Both these channels were doubtless important in opening up a 
connexion between the North and the Mediterranean, and reveal- 
ing to the Northmen the rich world of classical story. But 
neither explanation is at all adequate. It might possibly provide 
a bridge between the traditional Orestes and Saxo's Amlodi; but 
they are not in any pressing need of a bridge. It does not pro- 
vide any bridge where it is chiefly wanted, between the Orestes 
of tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet. 

There seems to have been, as far as our recorded history goes, 
no good chance of imitation, either direct or indirect. Are we 
thrown back, then, on a much broader and simpler though rather 
terrifying hypothesis, that the field of tragedy is by nature so 
limited that these similarities are inevitable? Certain situations 
and stories and characters — certain subjects, we may say, for 
shortness — are naturally tragic; these subjects are quite few in 
niunber, and, consequently, two poets or sets of poets trying to 
find or invent tragic subjects are pretty sure to fall into the same 
paths. I think there is some truth in this suggestion ; and I shall 
make use of something like it later. But I do not think that in 
itself it is enough or nearly enough to explain such close and 
detailed and fundamental similarities as those we are considering. 
I feel as I look at these two traditions that there must be a con- 
nexion somewhere. 

There is none within the limits of our historical record ; but can 
there be any outside? There is none between the dramas, nor even 
directly between the sagas; but can there be some original con- 
nexion between the myths, or the primitive religious rituals, on 
which the dramas are ultimately based? And can it be that the 
ultimate similarities between Euripides and Shakespeare are sim- 
ply due to the natural working out, by playwrights of special 



HA3ILET AXD ORESTES 19 

genius, of the dramatic possibilities latent in that original seedr 
If this is so, it will lead us to some interesting conclosions. 

To begia with, then, can we discover the original myth out of 
which the Greek Orestes-saga has grown? (I do not denv the 
possible presence of an historical element also : but if historv is 
there, there is certainly myth mixed up with it. ) It contains two 
parts: 

(1) Agamemnon, 'ting of men', is dethroned and slain by a 
yoimger kinsman, who is helped by the Queen. (2) His successor, 
in turn, dreads and tries to destroy the next heir to the throne, 
who however comes home secretly and slays both him and the 
Queen. 

The story falls into its place ia a clearly marked group of 
Greek or pre-Greek legends. L.et us recall the primaeval kings 
of the world in Hesiod. 

First there was Ouranos and his wife Gaia: Ouranos lived in 
dread of his children and '' hid them away ' till his son Kronos 
rose and cast him out, helped by the Queen-mother Gaia. 

Then came King Kronos with his wife Rhea. He, too, feared 
his children and ' swallowed them ', till his son Zeus rose and cast 
him out, helped by the Queen-mother Rhea. 

Then thirdly . . . but the story cannot continue. For Zeus 
is still ruling and cannot have been cast out. But he was saved 
by a narrow margin. He was about to marry the Sea-maiden 
Thetis, when Prometheus warned him that, if he did so, the son 
of Thetis would be greater than he and cast him out from heaven. 
And, great as is my love for Thetis, I have little doubt that she 
would have been found helping her son in his criminal behaviour. 

In the above cases the new usurper is represented as the son 
of the old King and Queen. Consequently the Queen-mother, 
though she helps him, does not marry him, as she does when he is 
merely a younger kinsman. But there is one great saga in which 
the marriage of mother and son has remained, quite unsoftened 
and unexpurgated. In Thebes King Laius and his wife Jocasta 
knew that their son would slay and dethrone his father. Laius 
orders the son's death, but he is saved by the Queen-mother, and, 
after slaying and dethroning his father, marries her. She is 
afterwards slain or dethroned with him, as Clytenmestra is with 
Aegisthus, and Gertrude with Claudius. 

What is the conunon element in all these stories.^ You will 
doubtless have recognized it. It is the world-wide ritual storv of 



20 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

what we may call the Golden-Bough Kings. That ritual story 
is, as I have tried to show elsewhere, the fundamental conception 
that lies at the root of Greek tragedy ; as it lies at the root of 
the traditional Mummers' Play which, though deeply degraded 
and vulgarized, is not quite dead yet in the countries of Northern 
Europe ; as it lies at the root of so large a part of all the religions 
of mankind. 

I must not encumber my argument by any long explanation of 
the Vegetation Kings or Year-daemons. But there are perhaps 
two points that we should remember, to save us from confusion 
later on. First, there are two early modes of reckoning: you 
can reckon by seasons or half-years, by summers and winters ; 
or you can reckon with the whole year as your unit. On the 
first system a Summer-king or Vegetation-spirit is s.lain by Win- 
ter and rises from the dead in the Spring. On the second each 
Year-king comes first as a wintry slayer, weds the queen, grows 
proud and royal, and then is slain by the Avenger of his prede- 
cessor. These two conceptions cause some confusion in the myths, 
as they do in most forms of the Mummers' Play. 

The second point to remember is that this death and vengeance 
was really enacted among our remote ancestors in terms of human 
bloodshed. The sacred king really had ' slain the slayer ' and 
was doomed himself to be slain. The queen might either be taken 
on by her husband's slayer, or else slain with her husband. It 
is no pale myth or allegory that has so deeply dyed the first pages 
of human history. It is man's passionate desire for the food that 
will save him from starvation, his passionate memory of the 
streams of blood, willing and unwilling, that have been shed to 
keep him alive. But for all this subject I must refer you to the 
eloquent pages of Sir James Frazer. 

Thus Orestes, the madman and king-slayer, takes his place be- 
side Brutus the Fool, who expelled the Tarquins, and Amlodi the 
Fool, who burnt King Feng at his winter feast. The great Greek 
scholar Hermann Usener some years since, on quite another set 
of grounds, identified Orestes as a Winter God, a slayer of the 
summer.^ He is the man of the cold mountains who slays an- 
nually the Red Neoptolemus at Delphi; he is the ally of death 
and the dead ; he comes suddenly in the dark ; he is mad and rag- 
ing, like the winter god Maimaktes and the storms. In Athenian 
ritual, it seems, a cloak was actually woven for him in late 
Autumn, lest he should be too cold (Aristophanes, Birds, 712). 
^ Heilige Handlung, in the Archiv fur Religionsvnssenschaft, 1904. 



HAiMLET AND ORESTES 21 

Thus he is quite unHke the various bright heroes who slay dragons 
of darkness ; he finds his comrade in the Bitter Fool — may we 
say the bitter Amloui? — of many Mummers' Plays, who is the 
Slayer of the Joyous King. 

But can we talk thus of Hamlet-Amlodi ? I mean, can we 
bring him into the region of myth, and myth of the same kind 
that we find in Greece? Here I am quite off my accustomed 
beat, and must speak with diffidence and under correction from 
my betters. But it seems beyond doubt, even to my most imper- 
fect scrutiny of the material, that the same forms of myth and 
the same range of primitive religious conceptions are to be found 
in Scandinavia as in other Arian countries. 

There are several wives in the Ynglinga saga who seem to be- 
long to the Gaia-Rhea-Clytemnestra-Jocasta type. For instance. 
King Vanlandi was married to Drifa of Finland, and was killed 
by her in conjunction with their son Visburr, who succeeded to 
the kingdom. (The slaying was done by witchcraft; but no in- 
jury could, I think, exculpate Visburr.) 

Visburr in turn married the daughter of Aude the Wealthy. 
Like Agamemnon he was unfaithful to his wife, so she left him 
and sent her two sons to talk to him and duly, in the proper 
ritual manner, to burn him in his house. Just as the Hamlet 
of Saga burned King Feng, just as the actual northern villagers 
at their festival burned the Old Year. 

Again, there are clear traces of kings who are sacrificed and 
are succeeded by their slayers. Most of the Yngling kings die 
in sacrificial ways. One is confessedly sacrificed to avert famine, 
one killed by a sacrificial bull, one falls off his horse in a temple 
and dies, one burns himself on a pyre at a festival. Another — 
like Ouranos and Kronos and the other child-swallowers — sacrifices 
one of his sons periodically in order to prolong his own life. I 
cite these cases merely to show that such ideas were apparently 
current in primitive Norse society as well as elsewhere. But the 
matter is really clinched by Saxo himself. He not only gives us 
the tale of Ole, King of the Beggars, who came in disguise, with 
one servant dressed as a woman, to King Thore's house, got him- 
self hailed as king in mockery and then slew Thore and took the 
crown [254]. He definitely tells us, in a story about the Sclavs, 
that ' By public law of the ancients the succession to the throne 
belonged to him who should slay the king ' [277]. 

So that when we find that the Hamlet of Saga resembles 
Orestes so closely ; when we find that he is the bitter fool and king- 



22 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

slayer ; when especially we find that Hamlet's mother, whatever her 
name, Geinitha, Gertrude, or Amba, and Amlodi's mother and 
Ambales' mother, and the mother of divers variants of Hamlet, 
like Helgi and Hroar, and Hamlet's wife, and the wife of Anlaf 
Curan, who is partly identified with Hamlet, all alike play this 
strange part of wedding — if not helping — their husband's slayer 
and successor, we can hardly hesitate to draw the same sort of 
conclusion as would naturally follow in a Greek story. Hamlet 
is more deeply involved in this Clytemnestra-like atmosphere than 
any person I know of outside Hesiod. And one cannot fail to be 
reminded of Oedipus and Jocasta by the fact, which is itself of 
no value in the story but is preserved both in Saxo and the 
Ambales Saga, that Amlodi slept in his mother's chamber (Saxo, 
88; Ambales, p. 119 et ante, ed. Gollancz).^ 

There is something strangely characteristic in the saga-treat- 
ment of this ancient King's Wife, a woman under the shadow 
of adultery, the shadow of incest, the shadow of murder, who is 
yet left in most of the stories a motherly and sympathetic char- 
acter. Clytemnestra is an exception, and perhaps Gormflaith. 
But Gaia, Rhea, and even Jocasta, are all motherly and sympa- 
thetic. So is Gerutha, the wife of Orvandil and the mother of 
Amleth, and Amba the mother of Ambales. And if Gerutha is 
the same as Groa, the usual wife of Orvandil, ' Groa ', says Pro- 
fessor Rydberg, ' was a tender person devoted to the members of 
her family.' The trait remains even in Shakespeare. ' Gertrude ', 
says Professor Bradley, ' had a soft animal nature. . . . She 
loved to be happy like a sheep in the sun, and to do her justice 
she loved to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun.' Just 
the right character for our Mother Earth ! For, of course, that 
is who she is. The Greek stories speak her name openly; Gaia 
and Rhea are confessed Earth-Mothers, Jocasta only a stage less 
so. One cannot apply moral disapproval to the annual re-mar- 
riages of Mother Earth. Nor yet possibly to the impersonal and 
compulsory marriages of the human queen in certain very primitive 
stages of society. But later on, when life has become more fully 
human, if once a poet or dramatist gets to thinking of the story, 
and tries to realize the position and feelings of this eternally 
traitorous wife, this eternally fostering and protecting mother, 
he cannot but feel in her that element of inward conflict which is 
the seed of great drama. She is torn between husband, lover, 

^ In the extant form ef the Ambales Saga Amba's personal chastity is 
preserved by a miracle; such an exception approves the rule. 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 23 

and son; and the avenging son, the mother-murderer, how is he 
torn ? 

EngHsh Tragedy has followed the son. Yet Gerutha, Amba, 
Gertrude, Hermutrude, Gormflaith, Gaia, Rhea, Jocasta — there 
is tragedy in all of them, and it is in the main the same tragedy. 
Why does the most tragic of all of them, Clytemnestra, stand out 
of the picture.? 

One can only surmise. For one thing, Clytemnestra, like Ger- 
trude in some stories, has both the normal experiences of the 
primitive King's Wife. Married to the first king, she is taken 
on by the second and slain hj the third ; and both parts of her 
story are equally emphasized, which is not the case with the other 
heroines. Their deaths are generally softened or ignored. But, 
apart from this, I am inclined to lay most stress on the deliberate 
tragic art of Aeschylus. He received from the tradition a 
Clytemnestra not much more articulate than Gerutha ; but it 
needed only a turn of the wrist to change her from a silent and 
passive figure to a woman seething with tragic passions. If Saxo 
had had a mind like Aeschylus, or if Shakespeare had made Ger- 
trude his central figure instead of Hamlet, Clytemnestra would 
perhaps not have stood so much alone. 

And what of Hamlet himself as a mythical character? I find, 
almost to my surprisCj exactly the evidence I should have liked 
to find. Hamlet in Saxo is the son of Horvendillus or Orvandil, 
an ancient Teutonic god connected with Dawn and the Spring. 
His great toe, for instance, is now the Morning Star. (It was 
frozen off ; that is why it shines like ice.) His wife was Groa, who is 
said to be the Green Earth ; he slew his enemy Collerus — Kollr the 
Hooded or perhaps the Cold — in what Saxo calls ' a sweet and 
spring-green spot ' in a budding wood. He was slain by his 
brother and avenged by his son. The sort of conclusion towards 
which I, on my different lines, was groping had already been drawn 
by several of the recognized Scandinavian authorities ; notably by 
Professor Gollancz (who especially calls attention to the part 
played by the hero's mother), by Adolf Zinzow, and by Victor 
Rydberg. Professor Elton is more guarded, but points, on the 
whole, in the same direction.^ 

^ Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland, Introduction; Zinzow, Die Hamletsaga an und 
mit verwandten Sagen erldutert, 1877 ; Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, Engl. tr. 
by Anderson, 1889; Elton, Appendix ii to his translation of Saxo, edited by 
York Powell. Rydberg goes so far as to identify Hamlet with "Grva'ir'dirs 
famous son Swipdag. ' Two Dissertations on the Hamlet of Saxo and of 



M ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914 

Thus, if these arguments are trustworthy, we finally run the 
Hamlet-saga to earth in the same ground as the Orestes-saga; in 
that prehistoric and world-wide ritual battle of Summer and Win- 
ter, of Life and Death, which has played so vast a part in the 
mental development of the human race and especially, as Mr. E. 
K. Chambers has shown us, in the history of mediaeval drama. 
Hamlet also, like Orestes, has the notes of the Winter about him. 
Though he is on the side of right against wrong he is no joyous 
and triumphant slayer. He is clad in black, he rages alone, he 
is the bitter Fool who must slay the King.^ 

IV 

It seems a strange thing, this gradual shaping and re-shaping 
of a primitive folk-tale, in itself rather empty and devoid of 
character, until it issues in a great tragedy which shakes the 
world. Yet in Greek literature, I am sure, the process is a com- 
mon, almost a normal, one. Myth is defined by a Greek writer as 
ra Xsyo/^sva evii roii dpoofxeroi^^ « the things said over a ritual 
act '. For a certain agricultural rite, let us suppose, you tore a 
corn-sheaf in pieces and scattered the grain; and to explain why 
you did so you told a myth. There was once a young and beau- 
tiful Prince who was torn in pieces. . . . Was he torn by hounds 
or wild beasts in requital for some strange sin ? Or was he utterly 
innocent, torn by mad Thracian women or devilish Titans, or 
the working of an unjust curse.? As the group in the village talks 
together, and begins to muse and wonder and make unconscious 
poetry, the story gets better and stronger and ends by being the 
tragedy of Pentheus or Hippolytus or Actaeon or Dionysus him- 
self. No doubt history comes in as well. Things happened in 
antiquity as much as now ; and people were moved by them at the 
time and talked about them afterwards. But to observe exactly, 
and to remember and report exactly, is one of the very latest and 
rarest of human accomplishments. By the help of much written 
record and much mental training we can now manage it pretty 
well. But early man was at the time too excited to observe, and 
afterwards too indifferent to record, and always too much beset 

Shakespeare ' by E,. Gr. Latham contain linguistic and mythological sugges- 
tions. I have not come across the works of Gubernatis mentioned in Ward, 
English Dramatic Literature", ii. p. 165. 

^ I believe this figure of the Fool to be capable of further analysis, but will 
not pursue the question here. 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 25 

by fixed forms of thought ever to take in concrete facts exactly. 
(As a matter of fact he did not even wish to do so ; he was aim- 
ing at something quite different.) In any case, the facts, as they 
happened, were thrown swiftly into the same crucible as the myths. 
Men did not research. They did not keep names and dates distinct. 
They talked together and wondered and followed their musings 
till an historical king of Ireland grew very like the old mythical 
Amlodi, an historical king of Mycenae took on part of the story 
of a primitive Ouranos or Sky-King wedded to an Earth-Mother. 
And in later times it was the myth that lived and grew great rather 
than the history. The things that thrill and amaze us in Hamlet 
or the Agamemnon are not any historical particulars about me- 
diaeval Elsinore or prehistoric Mycenae, but things belonging to 
the old stories and the old magic rites, which stirred and thrilled 
our forefathers five and six thousand years ago ; set them dancing 
all night on the hills, tearing beasts and men in pieces, and joy- 
ously giving up their own bodies to the most ghastly death, to 
keep the green world from dying and to be the saviours of their 
own people. 

I am not trying to utter a paradox, nor even to formulate a 
theory. I am not for a moment questioning or belittling the ex- 
istence or the overwhelming artistic value, of individual genius. I 
trust no one will suspect me of so doing. I am simply trying to 
understand a phenomenon which seems, before the days of the 
printed book and the widespread reading public, to have occurred 
quite normally and constantly in works of imaginative literature, 
and doubtless in some degree is occurring still. 

What does our hypothesis imply? It seems to imply, first, a 
great unconscious solidarity and continuity, lasting from age to 
age, among all the Children of the Poets, both the Makers and the 
Callers-forth, both the artists and the audiences. In artistic 
creation, as in all the rest of life, the traditional element is far 
larger, the purely inventive element far smaller, than the unso- 
phisticated man supposes. 

Further, it implies that in the process of Tradition — that is, of 
being handed on from generation to generation, constantly modi- 
fied and expurgated, re-felt and re-thought — a subject sometimes 
shows a curious power of almost eternal durability. It can be 
vastly altered; it may seem utterly transformed. Yet some in- 
herent quality still remains, and significant details are repeated 
quite unconsciously by generation after generation of poets. Nay, 
more. It seems to show that there often is latent in some primitive 



26 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1914? 

myth a wealth of detailed drama, waiting only for the dramatist of 
genius to discover it and draw it forth. Of course we must not 
exaggerate this point. We must not say that Hamlet or the 
Electra is latent in the original ritual as a flower is latent in the 
seed. The seed, if it just gets its food, is bound to develop along 
a certain fixed line ; the myth or ritual is not. It depends for its 
development on too many live people and too many changing and 
complex conditions. We can only say that some natural line of 
growth is there, and in the case before us it seems to have asserted 
itself, both in large features and in fine details, in a rather ex- 
traordinary way. The two societies in which the Hamlet and 
Orestes tragedies aa'ose were very dissimilar, the poets were quite 
different in character and quite independent, even the particular 
plays themselves differed greatly in plot and setting and technique 
and most other qualities; the only point of contact lies at their 
common origin many thousand years ago, and yet the funda- 
mental identity still shows itself, almost unmistakable. 

This conception may seem strange; but after all in the history 
of religion it is already a proven and accepted fact, this ' almost 
eternal durability ' of primitive conceptions and even primitive 
rites. Our hypothesis will imply that what is already known to 
happen in religion may also occur in imaginative drama. 

If this is so, it seems only natural that those subjects, or some 
of those subjects, which particularly stirred the interest of primi- 
tive men, should still have an appeal to certain very deep-rooted 
human instincts. I do not say that they will always move us now ; 
but, when they do, they will tend to do so in ways which we recog- 
nize as particularly profound and poetical. This comes in part 
from their original quality ; in part, I suspect, it depends on 
mere repetition. We all know the emotional charm possessed by 
famous and familiar words and names, even to hearers who do not 
understand the words and know little of the bearers of the 
names. I suspect that a charm of that sort lies in these stories 
and situations, which are — I cannot quite keep clear of metaphor 
■ — deeply implanted in the memory of the race, stamped, as it were, 
upon our physical organism. We have forgotten their faces and 
their voices ; we say that they are strange to us. Yet there is 
something in us which leaps at the sight of them, a cry of the 
blood which tells us we have known them always. 

Of course it is an essential part of the whole process of Tradi- 
tion that the mythical material is constantly castigated and re- 
kindled by comparison with real life. That is where realism 



HAMLET AND ORESTES 27 

comes in, and literary skill and imagination. An element drawn 
from real life was there, no doubt, even at the beginning. The 
earliest mjthmaker never invented in a vacuum. He really tried — 
in Aristotle's famous phrase — to tell ' The Sort of Thing that 
Might Happen ' ; only his conception of ' What Might Happen ' 
was, by our standards, a little wild. Then, as man's experience of 
life grew larger and calmer and more intimate, his conception of 
' The Sort of Thing that Might Happen ' grew more competent. 
It grew ever nearer to the truth of Nature, to its variety, to its 
reasonableness, to its infinite subtlety. And in the greatest ages 
of literature there seems to be, among other things, a power of 
preserving due proportion between these opposite elements — the 
expression of boundless primitive emotion and the subtle and 
delicate representation of life. In plays like Hamlet or the 
Agamemnon or the Electra we have certainly fine and flexible 
character-study, a varied and well-wrought story, a full command 
of the technical instruments of the poet and the dramatist; but 
we have also, I suspect, a strange unanalysed vibration below the 
surface, an undercurrent of desires and fears and passions, long 
slumbering yet eternally familiar, which have for thousands of 
years lain near the root of our most intimate emotions and been 
wrought into the fabric of our most magical dreams. How far into 
past ages this stream may reach back, I dare not even surmise; 
but it sometimes seems as if the power of stirring it or moving 
with it were one of the last secrets of s-enius. 



OF CONGRESS 



